Steve Taylor

Steve Taylor

Interim/Contract CTO, Technical Director, Head of Software Development, Consultant and Software Developer

Project Requirements for the New Orchard Website

2 minute read

To help achieve the projects objectives and goals, the project must meet certain criteria. These requirements can be seen as “Success Factors” or “Victory Conditions” in which the project can be measured.

I tend to write requirements down as User Stories which forces them to be user related. By doing this, each feature has a reason to exist and we combat against stakeholders asking for features that stem from opinion.

Creator Requirements

  • As a Creator I want to be able to quickly and easily download the right Orchard package for me so I can evaluate it
  • As a Creator I want to be able to quickly and easily find out how to install and setup Orchard so I can evaluate it with minimal effort
  • As a Creator I want to be able to learn more about developing with Orchard so I can get the most out of it
  • As a Creator I want to be able to learn how I can contribute to Orchard so I can help make Orchard better

End User Requirements

  • As an End User I want to be able to quickly and easily try Orchard so I can evaluate it without the need to download and install it
  • As an End User I want to be able to learn how to use Orchard so I can administer and manage my site effectively

Researcher Requirements

  • As a Researcher I want to be able to quickly and easily understand what features Orchard offers so I can validate whether it’s right for me
  • As a Researcher I want to be reassured that Orchard is a well-supported and fully featured CMS and is not going away anytime soon
  • As a Researcher I want to be able to assess the benefits of Orchard and compare with other platforms so I can be fully informed when making my decision on adoption

Administrator Requirements

  • As an Administrator I want to be able to quickly and easily add, edit and delete pages so I can keep the website up-to-date.
  • As an Administrator I want to be able to quickly and easily add community videos and articles so it doesn’t take too long to keep the website resources up-to-date.

Summary & Next Steps

Hopefully we have recognised and defined all the key requirements for the site. There may be other requirements that surface as we build the site but these are likely to be edge cases and shouldn’t affect the design or development. Next we’ll map the primary requirements as User Journeys.

  1. Objectives & Audience
  2. Orchard CMS Website Audit
  3. Comparing CMS Vendor Websites
  4. Humanising our Audience with Personas
  5. Project Requirements for the New Orchard Website (this post)
  6. User Journeys for the New Orchard Website
  7. Information Architecture for the New Orchard Website